Google Plus has a different privacy/sharing model than other social networks. Different from Facebook's confirmed tie model that they have been gradually breaking with ever more granular complexity. Different from Twitter & SlideShare's model of Asymmetric Follow, where people can follow/subscribe to posts that are public. Google+ is Asymmetric Sharing, where you selectively choose to share, but to make it into the main stream of view, someone nees to choose to share back. I give it high marks on privacy, but it inherently comes at a cost for complexity, virality, discovery and retaining social context.

December 17, 2008

With record layoffs in the 2009 Recession, more former coworkers are turning to each other to get jobs and start new businesses. In less turbulent times, large employers would invest in hosting Corporate Alumni Networks for sharing connections, knowledge and expertise. Unfortunately, just when corporate alumni need to leverage these networks to find jobs and start new companies, HR departments find such projects stalled.

Almost four years ago PeopleSoft employees experienced a massive layoff similar to what is happening today (Yahoo began laying off 1,500 workers; Sony plans to lay off 8,000 workers in its electronics business worldwide. Bank of America may cut 35,000 starting in the beginning 2009. Google has been quietly laying off staff and up to 10,000 jobs could be at risk for layoff).

A grass-roots PeopleSoft Alumni Network was formed by former employees, both on LinkedIn and Socialtext. Community leaders used Socialtext to share job information, get organized and collaborate on events. They later gained permission to call their newly formed non-profit organization the PeopleSoft Alumni Network. To this day, over 800 recruiters tap the network of over 3,000 members.

I asked PeopleSoft Alumni Network organizer Steve Tennant to comment on his experience:

"Socialtext was an invaluable technology for team collaboration at a time of need. With Socialtext's Recession 2009 offer, I'm looking forward to sharing best practices from our experiences in getting organized, helping people find jobs or start new companies and staying connected."

Today, Socialtext is meeting this latent need with a free Corporate Social Network offer for the 2009 Recession. Any former employee and HR director of a company that reduced its workforce by 5% or more in the last year can create a private Corporate Social Network for free by applying here. Please note that this offer does not include free user support. We ask for an HR contact to be involved to encourage a constructive tone, enable the HR department to share informational resources and so the company can leverage the network over time for connections, knowledge and expertise. However, as was our experience with the PeopleSoft Alumni Network, the energy and participation will likely be driven by the grass-roots.

Socialtext is also building out a public resource for sharing Alumni Network best practices at http://socialtext.net/alumni-network. The site will also serve as a public directory of private Alumni Networks as they are established, with instructions on how to join them.

My hope is that this Corporate Alumni Network offer for the 2009 Recession helps people come together to help each other:

December 07, 2008

James Governor is right to highlight Asymmetrical Follow as a core social software design pattern.

Asymmetric Follow is a core pattern for Web 2.0, in which a social
network user can have many people following them without a need for
reciprocity. Asymmetric Follow is unlike email for example, which tends
to be within small groups, with all users knowing each other
(newsletters are a clear exception here). If you see a social network
where someone has 5000 followers and only follows 150 back - that’s
Asymmetric Follow.

His post explores the concept I've described as pullattention management vs. push (email), and gets enterprisey with @jobsworth:

...The technical approach that is most appropriate to support
Asymmetrical Follow is well known in the world of high scale enterprise
messaging- its called Publish And Subscribe.

But Publish and Subscribe also talks to the social aspects of Asymmetrical Follow. As @Jobsworth puts it:

“I think we would be far better off considering Twitter
as neither Pull nor Push, but instead as Pub-Sub, as Publish-Subscribe.
The first and most beautiful thing about Twitter, as far as I am
concerned, is that I only see the tweets of people I follow, people
whose tweets I subscribe to. It is up to me to decide how many people I
can follow. For some people this may be a Dunbar number, stabilising
around 150, perhaps finding a Twitter adjustment to that number and
raising it. Others may be Scoblesque in their reach, dissatisfied
unless they push the 5000 limit (as in Facebook; I must admit I have no
idea what the Twitter limit is).

So one way of avoiding increasing noise levels is to avoid
increasing the network beyond one’s capacity. I can choose to “follow”
(or subscribe to tweets from) just as many people as I am able to cope
with. This is not something you can do easily with BlackBerry or with
e-mail in general.”

James explored further in his next post, getting Matt Biddulph to comment on if this pattern arose in Dopplr.

This graph shows the distribution of how many people
share with more people than share with them, or vice versa. The hump is
slightly higher on the right, indicating that there’s a bias towards
sharing with more people than share back.

The peak is centred on zero, indicating that the average traveller
shares with about the same number of people that share with them.

I think the hump is on the right because Dopplr is private by default, while Twitter is public by default. Defaults matter for social dynamics than any other designer intent.

With a default-private network, you share as a gesture, perhaps in
hopes of getting sharing back to form a confirmed tie. With a
default-public network, you share by default, and you follow as a
commitment of attention. With default-public, the hump is on the left,
in the form of a power law. Both networks follow the Asymmetric Follow
pattern, but they have different defaults reflecting the nature of the
objects shared and how people socialized around them.

Socialtext also employs Asymmetric Follow, where people follow other people's Update Feeds to subscribe to events like edits, posts, comments and tags. I actually think Asymmetric Follow emerged as a pattern designed for adoption, when you consider the alternative -- requiring a confirmed tie before sharing information.

One thing I've found fascinating about how this pattern works out in an organization, with its pre-existing social network and context, is what you can learn about someone from how attention is spent by them and to them.

To the right is how this feature shows up on a Profile in Socialtext People. Unlike Twitter, we needed to make it visually easy to discover who is following who (Adina would describe the design decisions better than me). What I can say is one of the greatest values is on-boarding new employees. Being a new employee is joining a new social network and the greatest challenge is understanding how information actually flows and how work actually gets done. By having a default-public network like this in place, on-boarding is accelerated and the strength of weak ties is leveraged.

Communication is heavily constrained by formal
organizational structure: the vast majority of communication occurs
within business unit and functional boundaries, not across them. This
points to the importance of drawing the right organizational boundaries.

Women, mid- to high-level executives, and members of the executive
management, sales, and marketing functions are most likely to
participate in cross-group communications.

These individuals provide a bridge for distant groups in a company's social structure.

At the Enterprise 2.0 Open sessions a frequent question was if there were any gender differences to be considered for implementation and adoption. This research indicates that women are more apt to bridge.

Some of our better champions are women that work across these boundaries. And even better, its our job to help them succeed and get promoted.

March 21, 2008

LinkedIn launched Company Profiles today, something I've been looking forward to for some time. This could not only be a great research tool for users, but I think is a sign of things to come.

We haven't seen great expressions of group identities within social networking. With this example you can see the potential of aggregating individual activity, profiles and external sources around a group identity. Hack the URL's number to discover others until the full release.

Recall that Reed's Law of Group forming says that the value of the network is the number of groups (2 to the Nth), because of all the combinatorial connection potential between members of those groups. Providing a group identity and exposing individuals for potential connection accelerates weak tie discovery and group forming.

We may get an new PR issue to explore with this. The profiles are trademarked brands that have been created not by the company, but by individuals. In part by employees, in part by past employees. Brand Managers will have to get used to the role employees have in brand definition.

Features like New Hires and Promotions and Changes bring new transparency to HR that may be as shocking to certain corporate mindsets as when Facebook introduced Mini Feeds. I've always said that while social software may get you laid, enterprise social software helps you get promoted. Now it tells the world if you or your colleague does.

October 26, 2007

This is a pretty big milestone in the development of the Enterprise 2.0 category at-large. Just a few years ago, the only analysts covering the space were blogalysts. Now, perhaps the most rigorous and influential vendor analyst reports in enterprise software says it really is enterprise software. The analysis rightly says we all have work to do.

It also says that Socialtext is the most visionary provider and behind only Microsoft, BEA and IBM in execution. This tells me that if we want to be the leader we need to demonstrate better execution (mind you, I'm not taking out IBM next year, but it is good feedback). SuiteTwo, of which we are a core component, also scored well in vision but has a way to go in execution.

September 04, 2007

If you are like the many people getting Quechup invitation spam, consider how it relates to the serious privacy problems with Social Networking. Quechup automatically imports your Gmail contacts and spams them when you register for their YASNS. If Bob signs up for it, he is opting into the graph, but he doesn't opt in to spamming Sally. Sally is included in the graph, whether she opts in to register or not. Over time, even if Sally resists, she is modeled as a node in the graph.

At first, this doesn't seem to matter. But if Bob adds relationship details like they are dating, and then her husband John opts into the graph and adds the detail they are married, you get the idea. But it is far worse, when the value of the network isn't the relationships, but simply the contact information. This is the case with enterprise social networking, particularly for sales. Many don't realize that Jigsaw actually pays people for submitting business cards of people they have met. Yes, there are financial incentives for people to register you into graphs without your knowledge. I'm seriously considering copywriting my contact information (Stowe Boyd suggested via twitter when I was exploring other ways of suing evil social networks).

The fundamental privacy problem is that social networks grow virally by adding you to a graph without asking you to opt in. Once you are in the graph, it may be hard for you to know you are in, let alone opt out (Spoke, you may recall, did this purposely). You are modeled without your control over social context, and identity and relationship data can be layered on top of you as a node. Not all data may be available to users, but more will to developers and all will to the social network service providers. Providers come in all stripes and you not only have to concern yourself with their ethical business practices, but the basic of security. Opening the graph to third party developers based on open standards is a laudable effort to solve one social graph problem. But the privacy concern of governance and oversight over those third party developers who have access to more data than users is uncharted.

Now, we have a very loose definition of privacy, particularly in the US. And the odds of a constitutional amendment are slim. But this is a new and increasingly popular risk to your right to privacy that unfortunately is not popular in understanding.

UPDATE: Someone pointed me to this Rapleaf public profile which I never opted into. Rapleaf has a decent privacy policy, but it is unclear if by emailing them to opt-out I become a user. And if I register to manage my public profile I certainly become a user "We use this information to process registrations, contact our users, and to provide our services." Auren Hoffman is behind Rapleaf, is very conscious of these issues and will probably clarify. But there is an interesting facet about public profiles people don't opt into. Great for SEO marketing and extortion signups.

UPDATE: Facebook opens to public profile search. Guess I'll change my profile picture from the one of me partying like a rock star. Also, copyrighting my contact info is a no go, perhaps I'll trademark it and me.

I'm also befuddled by the slippery slope of Facebook. Today, they
announced public search listings on Facebook. I'm utterly fascinated by
how people talk about Facebook as being more private, more secure than
MySpace. By default, people's FB profiles are only available to their
network. Join a City network and your profile is far more open than you
realize. Accept the default search listings and you're findable on
Google. The default is far beyond friends-only and locking a FB profile
down to friends-only takes dozens of clicks in numerous different
locations. Plus, you never can really tell because if you join a new
network, everything is by-default open to that network (including your
IM and phone number). To make matters weirder, if you install an App,
you give the creator access to all of your profile data (no one reads
those checkboxes anyhow). Most people never touch the defaults, meaning
that they are far more exposed on Facebook than they realize. zrven a
college network is not that secure. MySpace on the other hand is rather
simple: public or friends-only. Friends-only is far more secure than
the defaults on Facebook. And public is well-understood to mean anyone
could access it (and often this is the goal). But I know all too well
that privacy has nothing to do with reality - it's all about
perception. And Facebook *feels* more secure than MySpace, even if it's
not. Still, I can't wait to see how a generation of college students
feel about their FB profile appearing at the top of Google searches.
That outta make them feel good about socializing there. Not.

It seems odd to me that Facebook is doing all sorts of things to go
against what gave them such strength: group support for people who
wanted to gather around a particular activity, tightly controlled
privacy defaults, and simple/clean profiles (which have been made
utterly gaudy by Apps). I think I'm missing the logic here.
::scratching forehead::

Ross -- thanks for the shout-out on Rapleaf. Anyone can opt-out of
Rapleaf (and you do not become a user). We do have a bunch of people
that opt-out every day. We also have many people that choose to only
display some of their information (like just hiding their age or
gender). There are many public profiles about people on the Internet
(ZoomInfo, Spock, Wink, Rapleaf, and others) … at Rapleaf, our goal is
give people the opportunity to manage their privacy and numerous online
profiles and control what people see about them. Of course, we're a
start-up (and thus not perfect) … so we really welcome your suggestions
on how to improve.

I haven't seen the report itself, but Steve Rubel says "this is the first report I have seen that really delves into what drives and motivates people to engage with the web." I'll get a copy of it and see.

But I still contend that a more ideal community is scale free in structure. What I wonder is if you could benchmark these levels of engagement against a power law -- not just to test Forrester's findings, but to help a given company realize -- "we are under-weighted in critics!"

UPDATE: I got a copy of the report, which is a pragmatic approach that starts by valuing different kinds of participation. A given site could survey its users to understand existing psychodemographic profiles, then review participation points. It may discover latent potential in the Creator category and create a participation point for them. How the profiles vary by age is interesting:

Teenagers create more than any other generation. Youth between 12 and 17 years old are avidusers of Social Computing technologies, with more than one-third engaging as Creators. Butthis is a fairly self-centered age group — while very likely to create their own content, they areless likely than Gen Yers to be Critics and Collectors...

Joiners dominate Gen Yers. While this age group has higher percentages in each category thanevery other age group (except for youth Creators), it’s their sky-high participation in socialnetworks that stands out. In fact, there are slightly more Joiners than Spectators — meaningthat Gen Yers are less likely to passively read, watch, or listen to social media, even when it’screated by their peers...

Gen X Spectators form the foundation for future participation. While signiﬁcantly fewermembers of Gen X are at the top of the participation ladder, that four out of 10 are alreadyusing social media as Spectators means that they are well positioned to take the next step...

Also note that Creators self-identify themselves as leaders (38% say "I am a natural leader") than any other group, and those who participate in social software are greater influencers (Active categories range from 52-56% saying "I often tell my friends about products that interest me, compared to 33% for Inactives).

January 30, 2007

When on a social networking panel last week I said something that can be seen as stupid or insightful. Widgets are the battering ram for social networking sandcastles.

Since inception, social networking services have been islands amidst the web. Early calls for interop and identity ownership didn't lead to results, even with Marc Canter barking "FOAF" at every event. Meta-networks make sense in theory, but not as a business like many things meta. Trending towards P2P or personal ownership through client or service is even more ideal, but such decentralization never took root.

Perhaps something is happening now. With the rise to traffic and time prominence of MySpace, entrepreneurs and hackers worked their way into the system, because, well, there is no thing as a closed system. Widgets started to appear. Most notably, the YouTube widget made its way enough to build a $1B business, depending on how you measure, before MySpace caught on to the video opportunity they were giving away. But the next YouTube wont be video, and stuff comes from all angles when users are empowered to paste Javascript. Smaller players will make this even easier, with wizards to add widgets. And the blogosphere from which all this independently froths will keep driving the widget economy.

This is the walled garden under siege by gophers. No, not those gophers, but the ones that tunnel in a thousand directions and drive Bill Murray nuts. People will discover new services wherever the traffic and time is. Some services may overlay social networking as a service, like MyBlogLog does with a degree of execution. Attention follows. Value shifts to networks that provide both the right attention, openness and composition. My bet is a derivative of blogs.